Apple Anger Pro Users With Lack Of Third Party Support For SSD In Yosemite

Alan Sallabank has alerted us to a story first run on eoshd.com, that users upgrading to Yosemite may find that there external SSDs do not work after the reboot.

Andrew Reid writes:

This looks like a real attempt to kill third party SSD drive support in Yosemite. Thousands of video editors, colourists and filmmakers have taken to using SSDs as their boot drives for OS X…

The problem is down to Apple having introduced a new “security feature” in Yosemite. Only kext drivers for official Apple SSDs are supported. Built in drives that Apple themselves use in your Macbook Pro Retina and some iMacs will upgrade just fine to Yosemite but if you have installed a third party SSD or more commonly are running off an external one, you’re out of luck.

This seems to be down to Apple turning the screws developers with third party kext drivers that Apple has not ‘signed off.’ If you have anything with drivers that Apple has not signed off then you might be out of luck. I had the same issue when using a PreSonus audio interface when testing Yosemite in public beta, you may have the same issue with an audio interface and Yosemite.

There is a ‘fix’ or ‘hack’ depending on your point of view that can be found at the end of this story, but it is somewhat troubling that Apple seem to be acting in such a heavy handed manner.

Andrew Reid is not impressed, he writes:

I have to say I’m extremely disappointed by Apple with this. To have an official installation of OS-X simply stop working when upgraded from Mavericks to Yosemite is unacceptable for any user. For professional environments and pro video it is even more troublesome and it puts vital data and creative projects at risk. Is this what Apple wants to be known for? At the very least the installation should detect if an appropriate SSD is present before attempting to install and notify the user if there’s a problem. I just had a grey screen and a dead system.

Andrew helpfully points out that Larry Jordon has more information and a fix here.